Trans-D: A spiritual framework for service?
Posted on October 31, 2017“I’m not sure I ever want to call myself a ‘Designer,’ I said to a TransD Faculty member when I first entered Parsons to learn more about the program.
‘Designer’ is a title that has always bothered me. In the social good world, it connotes a savior-complex, over-simplifications and an obsession with objectivity. In the brand-marketing, Designers are vector-making commodities.
I am interested to create work on more intimate scales, infused with subtly, nuance, spirituality, and concern for the future of interpersonal relationships and identity. I wondered, is there a place in Design for this kind of sentimental disposition, or might I contribute more to the world as a spiritual leader/counselor? (True story: I was weighing TranD against divinity/rabbinical school).
Given the trend that religious institutions everywhere are dying, I chose TransD over a path in Divinity School: It seemed like a more fluid and versatile path. I felt encouraged that the TransD approach explicitly offered a place to integrate our values and external disciplines into the mix of our work. It would be my place to plumb the depths of the human soul through creative research and output.
So I thought.
I began to second guess myself upon reviewing the syllabus for the TransD seminar. The course seemed to only approach systems-thinking at the most macro scale. Where would I find the insights for my practice, a practice that seems far from these more global contexts?
Yet, something interesting happened. I quickly realized the lessons we learn about systems behaviors, whether by observing cities, evolutionary-biology, or innovation of currencies, can help us understand complexity at any scale. Our ability to observe systems at different scales, by zooming in and out, helps us to recognize patterns and more meaningfully and accurately approach problems wherever we are.
I was struck by how this concept plays out practically in the approach at Red, one of the most innovative design firms, noting that, “…up to half of a project’s timescale may be given over to problem definition and creating the right brief to answer…. Organisations are increasingly grappling with problems that are ambiguous in nature: neither the problem nor its direction or outcome is clear at the outset.”
Breaking Perception
I saw that systems-thinking was about recognizing the fallibility of our own perception and socialized thought. In a sense, “emergence” offers an almost mystical, non-linear alternative to understanding change beyond the purely rational.In the words of Stephen Johnson:
“The body learns without consciousness, and so do cities, because learning is not just about being aware of information; it’s also about storing information and knowing where to find it. It’s about being able to recognize and respond to changing patterns—the way Oliver Selfridge’s Pandemonium software does or Deborah Gordon’s harvester ants. It’s about altering a system’s behavior in response to those patterns in ways that make the system more successful at whatever goal it’s pursuing. The system need not be conscious to be capable of that kind of learning.”
Grounded in humility & faith in people
“The trouble . . . is that we are terrifyingly ignorant. The most learned of us are ignorant. . . . The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance—almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it.” – Wendell Berry
As Designers, we must accept the limits of our perception, the imperfection of our models to predict outcomes, particularly in an ever-changing world of interlinked, “wicked problems.” As such, we must learn to inhabit the grey-zone.
I think this should encourage us to divert our creative attention towards experimentation and improvisation in every sense. Divert us away from the savior-complex instinct to “solve more stuff” with new products and move towards a focus on the creative process of facilitating conditions and structure where innovation and insight can emerge in civil-society. As the Red Paper 02 puts it, “in transformation design, the designer is less the sole author of ideas, and more the facilitator of others’ ideas.”
Taking for example the open-source software phenomena; no one could have predicted the ubiquity of this system thirty years ago. At its inception, any rational-being observing market capitalism would have said there was no way it could thrive as a cooperative system where volunteers drove the innovation of code. And yet, it came to be thanks to the elegant structures and facilitation of Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux.
To borrow Jamer’s metaphor of the roses on the lattice: good designers build a lattice, but the end result should be that we see beautiful roses, not a beautiful lattice. This to me is a kind of spiritual leadership; the work of forging and nurturing the space where others can bloom, whether it is coders on the web or perhaps a greater movement towards more mindfulness.
For me, studying patterns of emergence instills in me a deeper faith in the power of people to defy authoritarian systems of power. Like most spiritual wisdom, it gives me faith in the power of something bigger than us: a dynamic, decentralized collective consciousness, a gestalt of our wisdom.
In conclusion…Trans(cendent) Design?
I am inspired to continue exploring how a transdiciplinary-design approach can offer a more spiritual framework for problem-solving, by rebelling against the hyper-formal, solutions-oriented, linear way of thinking that characterizes much of the design world.
For me, to be a responsible designer is to hold uncertainty in every facet of my research. To be comfortable in uncertainty when my clients/peers/everyone will demand that I make sense of the unknowable/unseeable. At a broader level, I believe it is my spiritual duty to help others unlearn the need for control. This is the root of so much violence and anxiety in our world.
Hannah Roodman